


A Hole Where Your Heart Lies

by PaperRevolution



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 15:18:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8805940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperRevolution/pseuds/PaperRevolution
Summary: When Cheedo asks some difficult questions, Capable is forced to remember.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place some time prior to the events of Fury Road.

“How old were you?”

Capable is braiding fine strands of Cheedo’s hair, but her hands fall still at the question.

She breathes in, slowly. And out.

There is no need to ask the younger woman what she is talking about. Because there is nothing else. There is only Joe, and his women, and the nightmare that does not end.

Cheedo is not a woman. She is a girl. She is a girl and she has years of this ahead of her.

Capable swallows hard, and bile burns her throat.

“Sixteen,” she makes herself say, and her voice catches, snagging on the “x”. “I was sixteen.”

It’s been almost ten years.

(They killed the baby, dashed its poor misshapen head against the wall as Capable screamed. Afterwards she had cradled its–her–malformed body and sung scraps of half-remembered songs. And when they had taken the tiny body of her daughter away, she had screamed again until she thought the sound might split her cleanly in two.)

She feels she might scream, now, the memory gathering pressure in the base of her throat. There has been no other child since.

“Did you love him?”

What a question. For a moment, Capable is so thrown by it that her mind wheels in blind, desperate circles like a bird with a broken wing.

Then: “No,” her voice is soft and flat, “And you don’t, either.”

Cheedo scoots forward, putting distance between herself and Capable. “Don’t tell me what I feel,” her voice comes out petulant and childish, and something constricts inside Capable’s chest.

“It won’t help,” she manages after a moment. “Trying to convince yourself that–that–” she pulls in a long, careful breath. “It won’t help.”

In the heat, the thin, frayed white cotton of her scant dress clings to her back. She no longer feels exposed. That is a raw wound scabbed over.

Cheedo doesn’t say anything. 

Close by, behind a door, Angharad moans in her sleep, plaintive as a little girl. She sleeps so much now, with the baby coming. Capable knows it is because she does not want to have to think.

(It had been Angharad who’d held her as she began to come apart; who had stroked her hair and rocked her while she cried.)

The silence stretches, beads balanced on a string.

“We’re special,” Cheedo turns to look at Capable finally, dark hair swinging in her face. Her eyes are huge calf’s-eyes, unknowing. “We’re lucky.”

The thing in Capable’s chest is clawing at her ribs, trying to pry them apart. She shuts her eyes, choking on the dry, gritty heat and wishing to be somewhere else, anywhere.

“Lucky?” she repeats with The Dag’s acerbic wryness, distilled. (It doesn’t suit her). Cheedo is watching her as though she is a snake that might strike at any given moment. And suddenly Capable finds that she is impossibly tired, and she has no ide what to say.

What can she possibly say, that would make the slightest bit of difference? She does not have Angharad’s way with words.

All she has is her hands, warm and strong and gentle, for braiding hair, for a sudden embrace. Her hands, and the memory of an unnamed child which burns like a lit coal in her chest, warmth where no more warmth is needed; warmth when all she wants is to be cold.


End file.
